


All I want is one more day (it's all I need, one more day with you)

by Elisexyz



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Kidnapping, Rescue, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 07:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14444658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisexyz/pseuds/Elisexyz
Summary: The door bursts open to reveal Grant, who looks way too comfortable for someone who just had to pull off an extraction in an unknown base single-handedly. [...]“You rang?” he says, lightly, walking up to her with a smug grin on his face.





	All I want is one more day (it's all I need, one more day with you)

**Author's Note:**

> For the Tumblr prompt: ["I asked for an extraction, not a one-way ticket to being stuck with you." + Biospecialist.](http://heytheredeann.tumblr.com/post/173330743819/i-asked-for-an-extraction-not-a-one-way-ticket)  
>  The team is on considerably friendlier terms with Ward (and no one got brain damaged, because I say so).

Jemma isn’t sure how long it takes him: she’s alone in an empty interrogation room, handcuffed and tied to a chair, unable to look out of the window – if there _is_ one, considering that she was unconscious when she was brought in and the light surrounding her might be artificial – and certainly with no clock available to check the time.

Still, they haven’t even gotten around to _starting_ the interrogation when she ears the first explosion, which fills her with relief and makes her roll her eyes at the same time, because of course it couldn’t be something _subtle_.

She hears commotion outside of the closed door, people running around, barking orders, no one apparently remembering that they have a SHIELD agent tied up in there.

She allows herself to relax as the knowledge that she’ll be out of there soon makes her smile in relief. The necklace hidden under her clothes has been an horrible weight at times, a reminder of what could have been and got ripped away from her, but she’s extremely thankful that she never had it in her to throw it away or stash it in a drawer.

Grant gave it to her for their first anniversary, and it’s a tracking device – albeit a very pretty one –, because he’s paranoid like that. When she woke up with an unpleasant headache, tied up in a strange room and alone, she figured that she’d better call the only backup available at the time. Thankfully she managed to press the button with her chin.

There are two other explosions, one that makes the walls tremble visibly, before the door bursts open to reveal Grant, who looks way too comfortable for someone who just had to pull off an extraction in an unknown base single-handedly – Jemma remembers the days when she tried not to worry too much after she watched him leave for a solo mission; the fact that she doesn’t know exactly what he’s up to these days does nothing to ease her anxiety over his fate.

“You rang?” he says, lightly, walking up to her with a smug grin on his face. His expression falls a little when he takes a better look at _her_ face. He reaches up to her right temple, barely touching her with the tip of his fingers. “You’re bleeding,” he states, his tone forcibly neutral.

“They knocked me out,” she explains, and it probably comes out a little too soft. Seeing him hover like that is such a familiar form of intimacy. “But a concussion is the least of my problems at the moment.”

He glances at her wound again before nodding and going back to freeing her. It doesn’t take him long to work up another grin.

“So you kept the necklace,” he states, and he’s not even _trying_ not to sound smug.

Jemma puffs in annoyance and stretches her arms before standing up. She’s dizzier than she expected, but Grant catches her arms immediately and keeps her upright until she’s sure that she’s not going to fall over.

“You know, I could carry you,” he offers, casually, but no, she’s going to have to draw a line there. She’s aware that she’s already letting herself get too cosy around him, no need to add _that_.

“I’m alright,” she replies, and she starts walking towards the door to prove her point. Fortunately, she does manage to stand upright the whole way.

Grant, unsurprisingly, left a giant mess behind him. Not everyone is dead, which she supposes is a good thing – but it surely isn’t deliberate: if she had to take a guess, she’d say that he was too busy trying to get to her as soon as possible to be thorough –, but she doesn’t even consider stopping to tend to them: it’s likely that Hydra will send some back-up sooner or later, Grant would probably carry her away whether she liked it or not, and she isn’t even a real doctor, she swore no Hippocratic Oath, so…

“I could take one to let you use a test subject,” Grant suggests, carelessly stepping over an half-dead Hydra agent. She hasn’t spent that much time around the real version of him, so she still gets caught a bit off-guard whenever he talks about violence so _casually_. The Grant she knew did what needed to be done but took no real pleasure in it.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she reprimands, automatically gripping his arm when she almost trips over somebody’s gun. He’s been walking so close to her that it’s a miracle they haven’t started stepping on each other’s feet yet. “These are all too damaged to be decent test subjects,” she adds, casually. She doesn’t know if it’s fair to blame it on the concussion, if she’s just mad because they kidnapped her and forced her to call Grant as backup, or if she just wanted to see if joking about death and suffering feels as wrong as it’s supposed to – they just feel like words, apparently.

Grant barks a laugh.

When they get outside, Jemma squeezes her eyes as the light pierces them, and when she regains clear vision she can guess that it’s probably late afternoon. Her team must be worried sick.

Grant of course has a car ready, and Jemma doesn’t think twice about getting in – after all, it’s not like she can drive herself back to base with a concussion.

“I can’t give you the coordinates to the base,” she states, as it occurs to her that he wouldn’t know where to drop her.

He snorts. “Please. As if I didn’t know where you live.”

Alright, that’s a bit creepy but hardly surprising: it’s common knowledge among the team that Grant is the one who from time to time sends them messages with coordinates to Hydra secret bases, or intel; sometimes he even serves them Hydra agents on a platter – sometimes dead, sometimes just unconscious –, even if no one talks about it. Believing that he knows the location to their brand new secret base is not much of a stretch, really.

“It doesn’t matter anyway, because we are not going there,” he adds, because of course he can’t just make things easy for _once_.

“What?” she snaps, glaring at him. He’s looking at the road, but she’s hoping that he’ll feel it anyway. “And what exactly makes you think that I want to come with you wherever you are going?”

“ _You_ called _me_ , Jem,” he points out, turning towards her just long enough to send an affable look her way.

“ _Yes_ ,” she acknowledges, slowly. “I asked for an _extraction_. Not a one-way ticket to being stuck with you.”

“Well, _obviously_ I can’t trust Coulson to take care of you,” he comments, and there’s a weird inclination in his tone that makes Jemma think that he’s angrier about it than he’s letting on.

She doesn’t pay too much attention to it, though, distracted by Coulson’s mention. “Coulson, right. I have to call them,” she says, more to herself than to Grant. “Do you have a phone?”

He glances her way, probably a bit annoyed at her for not taking his kidnapping attempt too seriously, then he briefly gestures to the back of the car. “There are a couple of burners in the backseat. Pick one.”

“Thank you,” she replies, distractedly, as she reaches for the bag dropped on the backseat. Inside there are some fake IDs, two spare guns, money, and, she notices with a smile, some First Aid supplies. He probably grabbed it in all in a hurry, considering how it’s uncharacteristically all thrown together, but he did take the time to think that she might need some medical help and to prepare for it.

It’s sweet in a way that traitors shouldn’t be allowed to be.

Jemma knows many phone numbers by heart, because it’s always better to be prepared. She decides that Coulson is her safest bet: he’ll be more practical than Fitz or Skye, and she’ll have the excuse that she called him just because he’s the boss – truth is, she’s way too tired right now to handle them freaking out, as much as understandably.

He answers at the fifth ring. “ _Yes?”_ he says, sharply, in the tone that indicates that she caught him in the middle of something. Well, she hopes so, considering that one of his agents is technically missing.

“It’s me, sir,” she replies, taking a look around to see if there’s something along the road that can help her pinpoint her location, but there are just fields and seemingly abandoned buildings, they couldn’t have chosen a more anonymous location if they’d tried.

“ _Jemma! Are you alright? What happened? Where are you, do you need an extraction?”_

“I was kidnapped, but I’m okay,” she says, immediately addressing the most important piece of information. “I already got an extraction,” she adds, glancing at Grant, who turns towards her to smile charmingly.

She pushes down the sudden realization that she’s missed him more than she allowed herself to admit.

“ _Meaning?”_ Coulson asks, slowly, but she gets the feeling that he knows perfectly well what she means.

“Grant,” she simply answers, keeping her tone neutral.

Coulson sighs. “ _Where are you?”_ he asks again. “ _Did he hurt you?”_

“I don’t know and no, he didn’t hurt me.”

“I’m offended!” Grant declares, loud enough that Coulson hears it, judging by his snort.

Jemma rolls her eyes. “Grant, where are we?”

“I’m not telling you, I certainly don’t want you running back to that death trap,” he states, obviously.

“ _So he’s kidnapping you_ ,” Coulson states, matter-of-factly, and he sounds more resigned than anything else.

Jemma rubs her face, sighing. “Sir, can I call you back?”

A pause. “ _Five minutes_ ,” Coulson finally allows. She doesn’t know what exactly he’d do if Grant prevented her from calling back, considering that he doesn’t have any idea where she is, but she doesn’t comment on it.

“Thank you.”

As soon as she’s ended the call, she turns towards Grant, inhaling sharply as she anticipates the frustration that she’ll feel trying to _reason_ with him.

“What exactly do you think you are doing?” she asks, trying to sound authoritative.

He glances at her with a shit-eating grin spread on his face. “ _We_ are going on vacation,” he announces, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

“We— what?”

This is weird on so many levels: first and foremost, he’s still technically a fugitive, he just saved her from a kidnapping and he’s holding her against her will to bring her on a _vacation_ , but also she has never known him to be fond of time off. Granted, his cover had much more sense of duty than the real him, it seems, but knowing this rationally doesn’t prevent her from feeling like _Grant Ward_ suggesting that they blow off everything to get some free time is wrong and weird.

“You’ve just been kidnapped,” he explains, his tone light on the surface but with wnough emphasis on the last word to give away his true feelings about the whole thing. “I think you deserve some time off.”

“I can’t just _leave_ ,” she replies. “There’s too much to do in SHIELD, and—”

“Let me put it this way,” Grant interrupts, his tone conversational and his eyes on the road. “If you come and spend some time with me, I will _forget_ that Coulson let those idiots kidnap you.”

“He didn’t _let_ them,” Jemma highlights, even though she knows all too well that he won’t change his mind on that.

“You are part of his team, therefore the responsibility is his,” Grant dismisses her, unsurprisingly. “ _But_ — I will be very forgiving if you get some time off with me to help me recover from the scare.”

Jemma sighs. She knows her options are limited here: Grant is vindictive, especially where her safety is concerned – and _that_ he always has been, cover or not –, so she knows that Coulson _will_ pay for this if she doesn’t give him a reason to let him be.

And, thinking about it, there really is a _lot_ to do in SHIELD, and she’s tired as hell. A vacation really isn’t the worse fate.

Sure, there’s the tiny detail that said vacation would be with her husband that turned out to be a mole for an organization that they all believed to be dead and buried, but— well, she can still attempt an escape at some point, if it turns out to be too unpleasant. And if it doesn’t— she can’t deny that she has missed him, can she?

“How long?” she asks, her tone dripping resignation.

Grant immediately picks up on it, judging but his grin widening. “I don’t know. It depends on how much we enjoy ourselves, sweetheart.”

Jemma sighs. “ _Fine_ ,” she gives in. “A vacation and you’ll stop blaming Coulson for this, deal?”

“I can’t say that I will stop _blaming_ him, but I will avoid manifesting it with violence,” he replies.

“Threats count as violence,” she remarks, because she’s not about to leave him any loophole.

“Sarcastic remarks?”

“As long as they are civil,” she concedes, after a few seconds of contemplation, because the next time that he sees Coulson he’d probably implode otherwise.

“Deal,” he announces, turning towards her long enough to smile candidly. It takes sheer willpower not to reciprocate.

When she calls Coulson back to explain the situation, he takes it way better than she feared.

“ _So he’s blackmailing you— into taking a vacation_ ,” he recaps, slowly. Jemma can imagine him rubbing his forehead and showing the ten extra years that the uprising added on his shoulders.

“Pretty much.”

“ _And you don’t think he’ll hurt you_.”

“I’m— positive,” she assures, with only a split second of hesitation. It’s not like he has ever really landed an hand on her, if anything no matter his allegiance he’s always done his best to keep her out of harm’s way. She’s positive that the worst thing that could happen to her on this trip is having to listen to him giving a speech to try and win her back – or maybe witness a murder; that could definitely happen.

“ _Okay, then. Try not to take more than ten days, will you? God knows we_ all _deserve a vacation, but we need personnel_.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll— call with updates when I can.” She glances at Grant, who puffs to convey his displeasure but doesn’t protest.

“ _Be safe_ ,” Coulson adds, before hanging up. Truth is, Jemma doesn’t think she’d be safer in anybody else’s hands.

After the phone call, silence falls between them, and she doesn’t know if she should be surprised by the fact that it’s not at all tense. Rationally, it _should_ be, because she is not leaving with him of her own free will, their relationship is as fractured as a relationship can be, and they don’t even have the _radio_ on to keep them company. As a matter of fact, though, she’s missed him and this feels natural. Like nothing has changed and this is that vacation that they so often talked about taking.

She wonders if this is Grant trying to mend fences by fulfilling her old desire, a way to show that he remembers all his promises and that he still cares about keeping them.

She probably shouldn’t find it half as sweet as she does.

“So—” she says, slowly. “Where are we going?”

“Well, Jem, that’s a surprise,” he replies, throwing another smile her way. He’s smiling quite a lot and it’s a bit distracting, seeing him that joyful, but it doesn’t prevent her from realizing that this is 100% him making sure that she can’t contact anyone and share their destination. “Do you trust me?” he adds, casually.

Jemma closes her eyes from a brief second, resignation at her own stupidity washing through her. “Unfortunately.”


End file.
